Blog on johnsto.co.uk

On the evening of Friday 14 May 2010, I received a PDF from the BBC.

In my own experience, it’s not particularly often that you find yourself asking your email provider to blackhole your primary, personal email address.

A review of the software and dev tools that I couldn’t have coped without this year.

I had the honour to be invited by Noclip to take part in a documentary about Dust 2 - it was great fun rewalking those memories, and the crew did a great job marrying it up with relevant footage!

Embarrassingly, I nearly missed the news that Counter-Strike has turned 25.

I’ve recently moved a bunch of containers off my Raspberry Pi to an HP EliteDesk.

I recently bought a HP Elitedesk 800 G4 off eBay.

I use a Raspberry Pi 4 running Fedora 38 for home automation and a few small other services.

Dreadful news, everyone.

I’ve been wondering for a little while how one could generate new Dust-style maps.

tl;dr: if you’re reading this, then everything went exactly as hoped and my website is now served via Netlify.

The exact moment I gave up my teenage ambition of becoming a level designer is seared into my memory.

(original link)[https://web.archive.org/web/20000815070055/http://www.planethalflife.com/davej/]

20 years ago to this day, I published my 51 Half-Life Editing Tips onto the Valve ERC.

Earlier this year, desperate for a new toy, I purchased the cheapest 3D printer kit I could find, in the hope it would give me hours/days/weeks of fun (a) trying to make it work at all, and (b) trying to make it work well.

The CS:GO YouTube video machine 3kliksphilip has put together a wonderful video about the third Dust map, aka de_dust_pcg.

Wolfenstein 3D, if you recall (and I hope I’m not spoiling the ending for anyone who hasn’t yet finished this 23-year old game), ended with B.J. escaping the dark, gloomy Castle Wolfenstein by running down an open corridor.

Back from a week in Barcelona, here are my trip notes for those that asked.

One of my favourite aspects of Go is the lively and growing ecosystem for third-party libraries, and I’ve ended up using absolutely dozens and dozens for little projects here and there.

On the Splash Damage Twitch stream the other day, someone posed the question, “Dave, what made you quit level design and become a programmer instead?”

I’ve been using Go for a while now, and really rather like it.

With Halloween completely over, done and dusted for another year, spooky avatars and haunting usernames firmly put back into storage, Twitter was feeling a little less scary than usual this morning.

The map after Dust was always going to be a bit of an odd one, and that’s pretty much what happened with Cobble (or ‘de_cbble’ or ‘Cobblestone’ depending on who you talk to).

Recently I was working on a Go program that kept blowing up as I cranked up the test load but was struggling to determine why.

I’ve missed blogging.

This is the bit where we end.

Ok, this one’s a bit mean… Lord uNsaIN The Second I first annoyed uNsaIN on April 24th, where I said his map ‘ol_bunker’ had an unoriginal name and was “another bunker map.”

‘Cruelness’ has returned, but with a slight lisp.

Just a quick request to anyone who had their map featured in the ‘Cruelness’ series I did a few weeks back: It’s time to see the aftermath!

Last one!

Don’t model with brushes Some things are better created with brushes, as part of the world.

Don’t force it There are times when a change has to be made, but making the change will be tricky because it’s being retrofitted to existing geometry.

Design is everything Without a good design, your map is essentially wasted - unless that was the whole idea.

Hooray, a week of me pouring out my brain about stuff!

Now, I was going to write about something dull like how to get the most out of level geometry, but I had a far better idea before I got the first word out.

In the past I’ve written quite a bit about high-level level design, specifically, getting a good overall layout for multiplayer maps that isn’t too convoluted nor over simplistic.

Everyone who wants to make a mod wants it to be a popular as Counter-Strike.

I was looking for some textures earlier today, and came across a few of the original files I used when creating Sienna.

Many of the principles of game design rely on consistency - if a distinctive yellow-coloured barrel explodes when shot, players will expect this to be the same for all identical yellow-coloured barrels and will hopefully learn from it.

I’ve been playing more TFC lately, and whilst it may not have the bells and whistles of DoD:S or CS:S, it’s still remarkable fun.

Consider a rabbit.

Ok, over the past 4 weeks I’ve written about 11 maps whose screenshots were sent to me.

Much later than I anticipated, so I’m gonna get this up and posted while I can.

Where I live is quite industrialised.

Another two this week.

Off we go again!

My request wasn’t a complete failure!

Ok, this should be fun.

One of the benefits of working on HL1-based maps was that it took an order of magnitude less effort and less detail to create an area.

Sometimes, I can’t help but see something on TV and want to recreate it as a CS map.